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Mason, Shipstead and Ozeki shortlisted for 2022 Women's Prize
Meg Mason, Maggie Shipstead and Ruth Ozeki have been shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize for Fiction, with Elif Shafak, Lisa Allen-Agostini and Louise Erdrich completing the list.
The annual £30,000 award honours “outstanding, ambitious, original fiction written in English by women from anywhere in the world”. This year’s shortlist features two Americans, one American-Canadian, a New Zealander, a Trinidadian author and a Turkish-British writer. None of them have been shortlisted before although Shafak was longlisted in 2008 and 2013.
This year’s judging panel is chaired by author and journalist Mary Ann Sieghart, who said whittling down to the final six was “really agonising”. However she stressed: “We did it all in good spirits and amicably. I think we were all very happy with the final six.”
When asked about there being only one British author on the list, Sieghart said: “We weren’t deliberately trying to create a very diverse list, but it just happened. We chose what we thought were the six best books and they span the most enormous variety of theme and geography and style, which I think is great.”
New Zealander Mason is nominated for her second novel Sorrow & Bliss (Weidenfeld & Nicolson), described as a novel about modern love up against the confusing, sad aches of mental illness. Judges said it is “brilliantly spiky and hilariously written”.
American Shipstead has also made the cut for Great Circle (Doubleday) which was also shortlisted for last year’s Booker Prize. It tells the stories of a 1950s vanished female aviator and the rebel-hearted Hollywood millennial who plays her on screen and was praised by judges as “an absolutely wonderful read” filled with “the evocation of wanderlust”.
Also shortlisted is Ozeki’s The Book of Form and Emptiness (Canongate), which follows 13-year-old Benny Oh after the death of his father. Judges said the book “captures your heart and imagination” describing it as “touching, humorous and beautiful in equal measure”.
Shafak is up for the prize with The Island of Missing Trees (Viking). Set in 1974 in Cyprus, it tells the story of two teenagers who meet in a tavern in the city. One is Greek and Christian, the other is Turkish and Muslim, and judges said it was “clever and poignant”.
Trinidadian Allen-Agostini’s The Bread the Devil Knead (Myriad Editions) is also in contention. Her debut adult novel explores an abusive love affair, gender violence, racism and female liberation and has been hailed as “immersive” and “full of warmth, humanity, humour and sadness”.
Erdrich completes the shortlist with The Sentence (Corsair), which follows Tookie, who has landed a job in a haunted bookstore after years in prison. The judges said it was a “a really unusual read” adding “it’s a ghost story but it’s also about heritage. It’s really smart, funny and witty".
The six books were whittled down from an original longlist of 16 which had included Miranda Cowley-Heller’s The Paper Palace (Viking) and This One Sky Day (Faber & Faber) by Leone Ross.
Sieghart, who was joined on the judging panel by Lorraine Candy, Dorothy Koomson, Anita Sethi and Pandora Sykes, said the shortlist “contains a wonderfully diverse range of stories, subjects, settings and authors, from the experience of a Native American woman in a haunted bookshop to an early female aviator in the Antarctic.
“One novel is narrated by a tree; another by a book. Some are laugh-out-loud funny, others tearful, and sometimes the two are combined in the same book. We judges have loved reading them all and we commend them to you as the best fiction written by women and published in the past year. Our only problem now will be to identify the winner out of these six brilliant novels.”
She told The Bookseller she was particularly impressed by the originality of all the books, as well as them being “eminently readable”. She used the example of The Bread The Devil Knead which “is written all in Trinidadian patois which you might think was incredibly inaccessible but actually within about the first five pages you get completely sucked in to this very different world and it becomes very easy to understand".
She said the team was “thrilled” it was published by the small press Myriad Editions. “In fact she struggled to get her book published at all, so it’s almost a fairy story for her, which I think is fabulous, but that’s not why we chose it.”
A key theme of this year’s shortlist was also its humour. “If you read about the themes, things like long-term mental illness, you think ‘Oh God, can I really face reading an incredibly distressing book about long term mental illness?’, but that particular book – Sorrow and Bliss – was hilariously funny as well, I laughed out loud so many times in the reading of that book, I really enjoyed reading it.”
She said she was also “surprised” by “how brilliant Louise Erdrich was and how little publicity she’s had here in the UK”. She added: “I think she’s pretty well known in the US but she’s not talked about much here and that was a delightful surprise to us all. Ruth Ozeki I didn’t know either, and I absolutely loved that book.”
When asked how the judges will find a winner, she said: “I don’t know how we’re going to do it, but trust me we will.”
The winner will be announced on 15th June 2022 at an evening awards ceremony in central London. She will receive an anonymously endowed cheque for £30,000 and a limited-edition bronze figurine known as a "Bessie", created and donated by the artist Grizel Niven.
